It has been 10 years since the simultaneous terrorist attacks when hijacked airplanes hit the World Trade Center buildings in New York and the Pentagon outside the Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001, killing 3,000 people.

ＷＴＣ跡地ではオバマ大統領も出席して追悼式典が行われ、犠牲者の鎮魂を祈る。

At the "Ground Zero" at the World Trade Center, a commemorative ceremony will be conducted to pray for the victims. President Obama will also join.

On September 10, President Obama wrote a guest editorial for Yomiuri Shinbun titled "Indispensable Partnership". In the editorial, the president said "There's always the United States as the partner, for countries and people who want a peaceful, prosperous future. The United States is currently facing an economic problem, but is determined to play a leading role incomparable in the world". Touching on the relationship between the US and Europe and the Islamic countries that grew tense after the terrorist attacks, the president emphasized, "The United States is not at war with Islam, and will never be". (The president's editorial will be carried on "The Daily Yomiuri" on September 11.)

It is not President Obama's (or his writer's) own words that you see in the above paragraph. It's my translation of Yomiuri's translation, which will not match the original English verbatum.

Why was this paper, Yomiuri, selected as the vehicle for a guest editorial by a US President?

Yomiuri Shinbun has a colorful history in Japan. After Matsutaro Shoriki bought the then-small Yomiuri Shinbun in 1924, one year after the "Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923" with the help from the earthquake recovery agency, it went on to acquire huge national readership. In 1950s, the paper was used as one of the vehicles whereby Shoriki pushed for nuclear energy and promoted it extensively to the Japanese who were leery and suspicious of anything nuclear after the two bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Daigo Fukuryumaru's Bikini Atoll accident in 1954. The other "vehicle" was Nippon Television, where Shoriki served as the president. Extensively using both media, Shoriki, who in 1956 became the first head of the Science and Technology Agency specifically created to promote nuclear energy in Japan, successfully turned around the extremely negative sentiment among the Japanese concerning nuclear energy into that of ardent support. In 1965, Japan's first nuclear reactor went critical in Tokai-mura in Ibaraki Prefecture.

Shoriki was a former high-ranking official in the pre-war Interior Ministry, and he was incarcerated in Sugamo Prison as a Class-A war criminal but later released. In the post World War II days he was an CIA operative with a code name "podam" and "pojacpot-1 ". It is said that both the US and Shoriki were interested in pushing the national television network and the nuclear power in Japan.

Yomiuri remains unabashedly pro-nuke.

Old ties die hard, and the President of the United States sends a 9-11 message only to this particular newspaper.